A leopard made its way into the wards of a hospital in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh on Sunday, terrifying patients and staff for around 12 hours before wounding a police officer after it smashed its way through a window and fled.

The animal, which was still on the loose on Monday, was first spotted early Sunday in a timber warehouse in a densely-packed market place in the northern city, which has a population of nearly three-and-a-half million.

Within minutes, a large crowd had gathered and “a couple of mischievous elements” attempted to tease the creature, according to Sushant Sharma, a regional forest officer.

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It was then that the leopard ran to the Meerut Cantonment Hospital, about a mile away from the market square, and entered a ward where three patients were staying at around 1.30 p.m., said a spokesperson for the Cantonment Board, a committee of supervisors at the military quarters in the city.

There are about 8,000 leopards in India, and nearly 200 are poached each year, said Shekhar Kumar Niraj, who heads the India chapter of TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network run by the World Wildlife Fund. As urban areas encroach on nearby forests the animals are venturing more frequently into populated neighborhoods. Biologically, said Mr. Kumar Niraj, the wild cat is a multi-habitat species leading to clashes with humans.

Mohammed Ali Zafar, the Cantonment Board spokesman, said “there were about three patients in the ward who were evacuated in a matter of a few seconds and the door was shut behind them.” Efforts to cage the animal inside the hospital carried on for nearly 12 hours, Mr. Zafar added.

The leopard escaping the Meerut Cantonment Hospital.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

At 8 p.m., he said, a team of three officials from the Wildlife Trust of India, a non-profit conservation organization headquartered in Noida, arrived from Bijnor, a neighboring district about 45 miles north of Meerut.

Their attempts to tranquilize the leopard failed, said Mr. Sharma, because a cluster of reporters trying to take photographs of the animal made it irritable and it broke out of a door of the room where it was cornered and smashed through glass window and a concrete wall at the corner of a passageway at the hospital.

As it fled, the leopard bit Gajendra Pal Singh, a police official who was positioned outside cordoning off the hospital complex. Mr. Singh told The Wall Street Journal that he had suffered a wound on the left shoulder, which required seven stitches.

“But I am absolutely fine now and set to hunt the leopard down,” Mr. Singh said.

While the search for the animal continues, the district magistrate of Meerut declared Monday a holiday for schools in the city. He could not be immediately reached for comment.

Killada Satyanarayan, a senior police officer in the city, said that about seven search teams of at least four officers each, were trying to trace the animal. He said that it was “very strange and bizarre for the animal to appear out of nowhere” on the streets of the city.

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